Using SL for business/defense contracting

I am interested in using SL for fostering business in defense contracting...perhaps holding business sessions, teaching new employees, etc. If I can prove SL's usefulness to my company prez, he will okay the purchase of an island. Any ideas or clues to help this newbie out?

play and learn, understand the basic's of SL, read the building, texture and scripting forums often etc. etc. etc.

oh and buy a gun

do not discuss any sensitive material in SL.

It seems Mitch's dream is coming true already....but then again, the terrorists are supposedly here anyway. I'm sorry for sounding cynical, but in no way would I want to see our defense industry in SL....it's far from ready for that in my opinion. There is no Security whatsoever.
Plus if it involves spending Tax money, there will be Congressmen crawling all over the place, and we'll never get them out of the Sex Sims.

What are you guys doing there? SL is not that bad and of course it is possible. Other, even big companies, schools and universities, already do it.
But Roscoe in one way they are all right, you have to learn about SL first.
Tell your management you need half an year to learn and explore and then you will do a conception.
And when you start to explore SL, please dont start at the places where my previous speaker apparently explore SL, that seems to be the dark part of SL, which i don't know. (sorry, only joking )

Good luck with your projekt
Georg

Four major problems.

1. Stability. SL crashes often. Sometimes the cause is your computer, sometimes your ISP, sometimes the Second Life servers. Meeting with the General at 0800? Sorry, General, logins are disabled right now...

2. Limited group size. On a single sim, the maximum number of avatars that can be present at a given time is around 40. A full sim is generally VERY laggy. Over 100 avs can gather in one place, if you have 4 sims and put your meeting place at the common corner.

3. Minimum system requirements. Most government office computer systems aren't up to the job of running SL. Oh, they may DO it...but not well. Also, if you've got forty or fifty people on the same office network trying to run SL, your IT department is going to be pulling their hair out. Yikes, the bandwidth!

4. Security. SL communications are NOT secure enough to entrust classified, or even sensitive unclassified, information to them. Also, to keep your sim(s) private, you may have to make special arrangements with Linden Lab. Otherwise, ANYbody could fly by and attend your meeting.

Everybody freaks out when you say the word "defense." But I doubt Roscoe is proposing that they design missile targeting systems in SL.

There are plenty of Human Resourses, educational, promotional, non-proprietary types of activities that companies use SL for every day. IBM has a huge complex north of my Island and East of Caladon. None of their proprietary work is being compromised.

I would suggest a defense contractor could set up an island to show off their products like they do on TV every day. People would visit it if you gave them fun things to do. You could give away fighter jets! You could put out recruitment information, make mockups of hangars or research labs, maybe make an air & space museum that showcases some of your company's history. try to get young people excited about scientific research and give them incentives for getting engineering degrees.

I spent a few years working for a Defence Contractor in the UK whose main customer was the Ministry of Defence. I was bound by the Official Secrets Act, and actually still am, even though I no longer work there. Not that I ever saw anything exciting.

I can just see my boss' face. Hey, I just built a replica of that thingy we are going to put on that big submarine whose name we can't even mention - I left it next to the bit for the big tank - and left it out on the internet. He'd wet himself!!

As someone who has served in the military and dealt with sensitive content, I can't possibly imagine getting a security clearance approval for anything more sensitive than a "how to get to the base" roadmap in SL. If you couldn't post the whole content on a poster on the wall of your local pub, then it would get declined in a heartbeat.

Even if you bought your sim and locked it down to allow zero Public access, so only those employees in your training group could enter the sim, or even know it exists, you'd have to get a security clearance approved for EVERY Linden Lab employee, since any of them can access your sim at will.

I wouldn't use Second Life as a platform for serious business. Because it's not a platform for serious business. There is a little bit of media buzz about it, but the buzz remains about the testing of Second Life for serious business. No one seems to be scoring glowing successes yet. Just based upon what I know and think about Second Life, it will never happen.

However, entrepeneurs make money (occasionally) by proving naysayers like myself wrong. Maybe you want to be an entrepeneur who has the vision to jump on to the trend of the future.

Like other people said, you really need to explore Second Life for a month or two just to see what it's all about, and how it works. It's not necessarily intuitive. You cannot bring all your experience with the way the Real World works and apply that all easily with the way that Second Life works.

I would recommend also that you do a lot of reading about business uses of Second Life. If I were you, I might start somewhere like Yahoo! News, type in "Second Life" as a search term within Yahoo! News, and skim the results, reading the interesting ones. You'll find a lot of articles touting the business uses of Second Life; you'll find fewer, but far more persuasive (in my opinion), articles critiquing these uses. Read up, and then compare to see if what you have read matches your experience in Second Life.

I wouldn't think that it would be wise to make a huge initial investment in Second Life for business purposes. It might be useful for you to set up a presence, and have it available. Maybe mention of it will pique the curiosity of a business prospect. Maybe if Second Life does start to take off as a business platform, then your initial presence gives you a foot in the door (and status as a visionary). I wouldn't count on Second Life as an income generator; at best you might consider it advertising, or a gold star on your credentials, or a talking point with prospects.

Beyond having a lecture and display area to demonstrate to potential clients what you do, I can't think what a defence contractor would be able to do in SL. Presumably a lot of what you do and who you do it for would need to be secret.

Better to get your president to OK the purchase of an island, set up the defence trade stand in a small corner and use it as a 'front' for an exciting fun danceclub on another part of the island, with DJs and contests!

Conifer Dada - engine overhauls for tanks of all designs done under my own inexpert supervision on my patio by fully qualified dancers. Please bring just engines as access is not wide enough for complete tanks.

You should get in contact with a group named Clever Zebra. (hope its still around) They have done the research and building to make jumping into SL easier for a RL company. IM me inworld if you have any trouble finding them.

IMO SL could be a great platform for Your kind of contract work. Working 3D models linked to proposals and contract bids could be perfect use of SL. In world collaborative (small)meetings could bring minds together from across the globe.

You do need to "learn the ropes" in order to be able to use SL to a potential your employer will be satisfied with, But, You will find lots of Us inworld and here in the forums willing to help.




((Yes i know..... stability, limits etc etc... and i am being a bit idealistic. But if SL is to elevate to what we can really call a "platform", it is industry like this that will take it there...))

Answer: Make Better Shields for SL?

there's no such thing as a shield that works, sitting is the only soloution most the time.

moving your RL business to second life is good for one thing. nice publicity for under 2,000 US dollars, and your marketers time forcing every newspaper to know.

you could do some training, but it's the same price to make those same videos and have the teachers answer an EMail here and there(website is a lot cheaper than a SIM)